


Bruises on My Knees for You

by Linsky



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Getting Together, M/M, hockey feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-12 22:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16004468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: Maybe Patrick shouldn’t be surprised. He already knew Jonny was weird about checking him.





	Bruises on My Knees for You

**Author's Note:**

> Some flash fic I wrote today when Sheena told me how ridiculous Jonny was about not checking Patrick during training camp. Actually takes place in the present day, which is unusual for me! Happy new season, Blackhawks!!
> 
> ([Tumblrrrr](https://linskywords.tumblr.com/))

Patrick is just about angry enough to break a stick in half.

He doesn’t, because he doesn’t need to make that kind of problem for the equipment guys. And there’s too much media around for him to let the anger show on his face. But fucking seriously.

Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised; he already knows Jonny does this. Patrick yelled at him about it enough after the World Cup. But he thought Jonny got it—Jonny was nodding in the way that meant he was taking him seriously, not in the way that meant he was pretending to listen but actually planning to go on doing whatever he wanted anyway. Patrick knows the difference.

They’ve been playing together for eleven fucking years. Long enough that Jonny should have gotten over fucking patronizing Patrick on the ice.

“Hey,” Jonny says, tapping his arm when they’re going back down the tunnel. “I wanted to talk to you about our—”

“Not now,” Patrick hisses, pulling his arm away.

Jonny has the audacity to look hurt. What, does he think Patrick wants to get into this with the kids around?

Jonny probably doesn’t think there’s anything to get into. The bastard.

Patrick isn’t very good at holding a grudge, normally. He can tell it’s weirding out the younger guys in the room, after the press leaves: he scored two goals in the scrimmage; he shouldn’t be in a bad mood. But his anger doesn’t dissolve this time, maybe because of the kernel of hurt that’s buried underneath it.

He thought Jonny knew him better than this. He knows Jonny knows him better than this. That’s the whole problem. If Jonny knows him this well, and he still does this—

Jonny manages to corner him again after he’s changed, on his way out of the UC. “Okay,” Jonny says, pulling him into an empty equipment room. “What the fuck?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, are you mad at me now?” Patrick says.

“Well, not really, but sort of,” Jonny says. “You just blew me off in front of—”

“Yeah, sorry, maybe I should have let you keep talking,” Patrick snaps. “Then you could have told them all about how I’m not a fucking competent hockey player and saved them the trouble of finding out for themselves.”

Jonny blinks at him in the silence that follows. Patrick is almost as surprised as Jonny is, probably—he hadn’t intended to say that. Not like that. He doesn’t—he’s not sure where that came from.

“How can you even say that?” Jonny says slowly. “You’re—you just scored two goals out there. Obviously you’re—you’re more than competent. You’re _great._ ”

Patrick wraps his arms around himself. He feels dumb even bringing this up. Like, obviously he’s good at hockey. But also: “If you thought that, you wouldn’t treat me like a fucking kid on the ice.”

Jonny’s face goes through a series of expressions: he frowns, and then his eyes clear, and then they shutter again. Patrick can’t read what he’s thinking. “Are we on this again?” he asks.

Patrick doesn’t say anything. Yeah, they’re fucking on this again; if Jonny didn’t want to be on it again, he shouldn’t have done it again. Jonny can work that out for himself.

Jonny sighs. “It was a scrimmage,” he says. “None of us were playing for keeps. We’re not about to injure our best players right before the season starts.”

“You checked Schmaltzy into the boards,” Patrick says. “You checked everyone else you were guarding.”

“Schmaltzy’s slower than you,” Jonny says. “Just because he couldn’t avoid—”

“I wasn’t _avoiding,_ ” Patrick says. Jesus Christ, he didn’t think Jonny would actually deny it this hard. “I didn’t have to avoid anything, because you _didn’t try to check me._ ”

Jonny opens his mouth, closes it again, makes a couple of aborted attempts to say something. “So I was off my game, so sue me,” he says.

Jonny wasn’t off his game today. Jonny looked great out there. Jonny could absolutely have checked Patrick in a heartbeat, if he’d considered it worth the effort.

It’s been a long time since Patrick’s had to dredge this feeling up. It feels ill-fitting, like something he’s grown out of, but that just makes it more painful to have to shrug on again: the insecurity of the kid who was too small to play at the NHL level. The waste of a first overall pick.

He used to use that assumption against opposing teams, blowing past a defense that wasn’t as focused on him as it should be. But it feels different coming from someone who knows his hockey inside and out.

“It isn’t just now,” Patrick says. “You always do this. It isn’t always this blatant, but—” But it’s always noticeable, to someone who learned to flinch away from it. “I know it’s courtesy. I know you’re being respectful or whatever. But you have to get that it makes me feel like I’m about three fucking feet tall.”

He bites his lip after he says it. He’s expecting the joke about his height, the one that will derail the conversation. But Jonny’s not laughing. He’s looking at the floor, at the stacked-up mats. “That’s not…why I do it,” he says.

Patrick’s eyebrows go up. Maybe the words shouldn’t feel like such a shock: he already knew Jonny was doing it, unconsciously if not deliberately. But he never thought Jonny would admit it. “Yeah?”

“It’s not that I don’t think you’re a good hockey player,” Jonny says. “Fucking Christ, you’re the best one on the team, you know that? Maybe the best in the league. There aren’t even half a dozen guys who could—I’d have to be a moron not to think you’re good. It’s not about that.”

It’s good to hear, even if of course Jonny would say that. “So, what, you just don’t want to engage with me?” Patrick says. “Let me guess, it’s because the younger guys need your attention more, you’re trying to train them up, it has nothing to do with—”

“It _doesn’t,_ ” Jonny says.

“Right, you said,” Patrick says. “It’s just that your actions don’t seem to line up with—"

“Is it a such a crime if I don’t want to hurt you?” Jonny explodes.

Patrick stares. Jonny’s eyes are wide, hectic, and there’s something weird here. Patrick can feel it in his stomach. He can’t quite—

“I should go,” Jonny says, ripping his eyes away.

“But—” Patrick doesn’t actually know what to follow that up with. “I mean, yeah,” he says. “If you—okay.”

Jonny’s cheeks are blotchy with red. He doesn’t meet Patrick’s eyes as he leaves the room.

***

Patrick goes home and has a protein shake and does some stretches and doesn’t actively think about what happened in the equipment room. But it turns itself over in his head as he stretches out, a hum underneath his other thoughts.

There’s an obvious meaning to Jonny’s words: that Patrick’s too valuable to the team to risk hurting in a scrimmage. It’s still stupidly patronizing—Patrick plays in 82 hockey games a year, with guys who have way more motivation to hurt him than Jonny does; he’s not going to get broken from a little check in a scrimmage—but it’s a slightly less insulting spin on what Patrick originally thought. And it does sound like Jonny, to do the calculus that their star players shouldn’t get hurt before the season even starts and to pull his checks without consulting with anyone else about it.

But if that were all it was, Jonny wouldn’t have reacted like that.

It’s the reaction that sticks in Patrick’s head as the day goes on. He knows he was being kind of ridiculous with how mad he got at Jonny for not checking him; it would have been a bad idea to even bring it up for most of their careers together. But by this point they understand each other well enough that hockey conversations aren’t dangerous the way they used to be. There’s not a lot they can’t say to each other safely.

So what was Jonny holding back at the end there?

None of the possibilities are comfortable. Patrick keeps flashing to Jonny’s face at the end of last season, when they cleaned out their stalls without going to playoffs: the darkness there, like Jonny was seeing the end of something. Patrick’s been on the alert for that darkness ever since, and as far as he can tell, Jonny’s pulled himself back around to his usual determination. But now Patrick’s wondering if there’s something else Jonny hasn’t told him. What specters Jonny’s seeing on the horizon.

Patrick hopes he’s not right about that. And maybe he’s not—but there’s no good option, really, if it’s making things weird like this. Things between the two of them haven’t always been easy, but it’s been a long time since they were complicated. Patrick doesn’t like the idea that things might be tangled in ways he doesn’t know about.

He gives it until after dinnertime, and then he texts Jonny. _hey can i come over?_

Jonny starts typing right away. Then the typing bubble disappears, and it’s another twenty minutes before a reply comes through: _sure_

Patrick’s on edge as he heads over to Jonny’s condo. It’s not going to be Jonny’s condo much longer; Patrick hasn’t been keeping as close an eye on the details 9 Walton as Jonny is, but he knows that things are getting close to done. Soon it won’t be a trip for Patrick to get from his place to Jonny’s. He’ll just walk down the hall, and he’ll be there.

The thought is obscurely comforting as Jonny answers the door. He hasn’t turned on the lights in his entryway; there’s a light in the hallway behind him, but his face is in shadow as he lets Patrick in. It makes it hard to read his expression.

“Sorry about today,” Patrick says right away.

Jonny’s shoulders relax a little, like Patrick knew they would. “Yeah, I—you want something to drink?”

The lights aren’t on in Jonny’s kitchen, either, just the light-sensitive nightlights. Patrick doesn’t think Jonny goes around in his condo in the dark all the time. He’s never noticed it before. He doesn’t say anything, though, just sits down at the island.

“So, the thing at the end there,” Patrick says while Jonny’s pouring them some Smart Water.

Jonny’s facing the counter, his back to him. Patrick can’t see his reaction. “Yeah,” he says after a long pause.

“I mean, it’s not like I want you to hurt me,” Patrick says, trying for a joke. Jonny gives this little chuckle that sounds kind of fake. “But I can take care of myself,” Patrick goes on. “I thought you knew that.”

“Yeah, of course.” Jonny gives him one of the glasses and stays standing, angled a little away.

“But, I don’t know,” Patrick says. “It just seemed like…is everything okay, man?”

“Yeah,” Jonny says quickly. It’s really hard to see his face in the dark. “Yeah, of course it is.”

“There’s not anything going on with you and the team?” Patrick says. “Or, I don’t know. I’m just—it seemed like you were really worried about me getting hurt, and I thought maybe…” He trails off.

“Oh.” Jonny lets out a rush of breath. “No, sorry. I was just being weird.”

Patrick pauses to see if there’s more explanation coming, but that seems to be all there is. “Okay,” he says.

It would be easy to leave it there. This is when he could suggest they go play video games, or, hell, he hasn’t seen Jonny’s vegetable garden since the spring; Jonny always loves talking about that. But Patrick hasn’t played with Jonny for eleven years for nothing. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he knows it’s something, and it feels like it’s something worth pursuing.

“So what are you being weird about?” Patrick asks.

Jonny gives a testy little sigh. “It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

“If it’s affecting the way you play around me, maybe I should worry about it,” Patrick says. “I haven’t been injured in forever; why are you getting paranoid now?”

“You’re the one who said it wasn’t just now,” Jonny says.

“Well, yeah, but—” Patrick stops as he realizes what Jonny just admitted. “Have you always been this scared of me being hurt?”

Jonny huffs. “Getting hurt sucks. Do you want to do it?”

“No, but, like, I don’t want you to get hurt either, and I still play all-out around you,” Patrick says. And there’s that hurt again, sneaking in. “I like it. Leaving it all on the ice is—that’s the point.”

“I know,” Jonny says. He sounds really defensive about it. “Look, can you just leave it? I’ll get over it, okay? I always do.”

“Get over what?” Patrick says. Get over not wanting to hurt him?

Jonny turns a little, restless, like he’s looking for an exit. “Don’t play dumb.”

“I’m not playing,” Patrick says, and then makes a face at himself, but Jonny doesn’t take the opening.

“It’s been eleven years,” Jonny says. “I don’t have to play against you all that often. It obviously doesn’t interfere with anything at other times, so can you just trust me when I say I’ve got it under—”

“Wait,” Patrick says. His heart is beating really hard all of a sudden. He doesn’t have any reason to think he’s right, really, but—he feels like he is. “What are you saying?”

Jonny looks at him. His face is just visible now in a slice of light from the hallway, and he looks miserable. “I told you not to play dumb.”

“Jonny. Are you—” This feeling, like the other one, isn’t something Patrick wears anymore: it’s such a vestige of the past that Patrick thought he’d gotten rid of it. He shrugged it off eight, nine years ago, when he knew it would mean nothing but misery. But it’s still there—still fits, when he thinks about slipping it on. “What are you—”

“Stop.” Jonny looks terrified. He takes a step away, arms wrapped around himself. “You don’t need to do this. I told you—”

“Hey.” Patrick gets off the bar stool. “Trust me with this.” He puts his hand on Jonny’s arm, where it’s crossed over his chest; Jonny looks down at him with wide eyes, startled. “I don’t want to hurt you, either.”

Jonny stares at him for a long moment. Then he leans in and kisses him.

Patrick can barely breathe for the first second of it. Then he tilts his head and their mouths slot together and he was right: it does fit. It fits better than he ever thought it could. Jonny’s arms come up around him, gentle, and Patrick lets the feeling wash through him, reviving all the little parts of him he thought were squashed down forever.

He’s panting a little when they break the kiss. “See?” he murmurs against Jonny’s mouth. “Didn’t hurt at all.”

Jonny laughs, gasping, and kisses him again, pulling him in hard enough to bruise.


End file.
